An effective training program is essential for any SaaS company. In order to facilitate rapid onboarding for customers and internal users, companies must design training curricula that are both easy to understand and easy to replicate, and they must make sure to document everything along the way!

During my career in SaaS support, I’ve often taken the lead in creating such training programs and accompanying documentation, and I’ve been fortunate to have the leeway from my former bosses to experiment with a few different formats to see what works best. In general, it’s much more important for customers and internal users to quickly master the things they’ll do most often in your company’s products than it is to possess a shallow knowledge of more obscure features, and I’ve found that people learn best when they’re not faced with a single, all-encompassing training session where they’re expected to remember everything. Things really start clicking when customers and internal users also have a readily accessible content hub where they can find the information they need without needing to reach out to anyone else for help.

Here are some tips on how to create an effective training program that will suit everyone.

The 90% Training Model

Every software product, from the most basic word processor to the most complex machine-learning platform, has a laundry list of features available to customers and internal users. Your company’s engineers and developers and product managers have poured so much time an energy into these features, many of which were designed after customers specifically requested them. Naturally, then, your team should try to showcase as much product functionality as possible during training sessions. Right?

WRONG.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news – especially to any coder-types who might be reading this – but the majority of your company’s customers don’t care so much about the neat little tools innovated during the last development sprint. What they really want is to quickly learn how to use your company’s products to do their own jobs, which usually means they’re completing the same handful of workflows with the same set of features the vast majority of the time. With this in mind, your company should instead implement what I call “The 90% Training Model.”

Simply put, your company’s training programs should focus the majority of their content on the things the users will do 90 percent of the time.

In previous roles, I was in charge of showing customers how to use my company’s content management systems and, later, training my own teammates on how to work through customer requests in our ticketing and chat platforms. Having now conducted hundreds of these learning sessions, I’ve discovered that going through every available-button click does not lead to much information retention, in addition to being a pretty boring way of presenting a training. Instead, it’s up to the trainers to first learn how customers will be using their company’s products, and then to plan their learning sessions to emphasize the things those customers will do most often.

In fact, I’ve found the best way to introduce these sorts of trainings was to explicitly tell the audience that the products they’ll be working with are very complex, but that I’d only be showing them the basics. Quickly setting those expectations frequently lessened the nervousness everyone feels when learning something new, and reassured them that I wasn’t about to overload them with information.

At the end of these “90% Trainings,” you can re-emphasize to your audience that you’ve only shown them a small set of the products’ available features, and that if they soon find they need additional training sessions to focus on functionality outside of the usual workflows – a piece of the other 10 percent, if you will – your team would be happy to set them up. Still, it’s usually best to cater your initial trainings to the things your audience will do most often, mainly to make sure they can easily do their own jobs using your company’s products.

Hey, Break It Up!

For years, every product training I received or conducted consisted of the same format: one long presentation followed immediately by a brief question-and-answer session. During these presentations – which were really more like lectures – users were expected to take diligent notes as if they were back in school. The trainers would always take time to answer questions, but after being bombarded with an hour’s worth of information, users would often be too mentally exhausted to ask all but a few follow-ups.

In my experience from both sides of the proverbial podium, this lecture format resulted in a lot of confusion and repeated questions in the weeks and months following the training session. Many times, using this format would later necessitate additional training sessions focusing on information that was already shared, but lost somewhere in the middle of the onslaught.

The inefficiency of the lecture format was put into sharpest focus when I was working to onboard new internal support teams from recently acquired products. During those integrations, these teams had the very challenging task of learn how to use a different support ticketing system without any service interruptions to their customers. In other words, they needed to be able to retain the most important information quickly and completely. After a few rounds of trying (and failing) to make that happen during a single 60-minute session, I decided to switch things up a bit.

During a hiatus between integrations, I broke the existing lecture into a number of shorter, topic-specific mini-lessons. Using this new, divided content outline, I created a dozen or so five-to-seven-minute training videos that cumulatively contained all of the information from the old format. From there, our support organization had a library of training material we could share with new team-members, and it was training material they could continue to access whenever they needed a reminder about how something works.

By rolling out this video training format, the company’s new teams could digest the information at their convenience, rather than be taken away from their existing obligations and expected to remember how to do everything based on a single lecture session. In addition, they could pause the videos to take more compete notes and rewind the videos if they needed to see something again without interrupting the session for the rest of their team, allowing each individual team-member to learn at their own pace.

The same rules apply for training customers. If you can break down your usual live training sessions into several shorter videos, users will not only be able to more easily absorb the information they need, but they’ll also feel considerably less pressure to remember everything all at once. This more relaxed atmosphere will allow users to more fully consider how they’ll use your company’s products, which will make for far more productive conversations down the line.

Encourage Engagement

Another enormous benefit to sharing pre-created training material with users is that you provide a lot more time for your audience to ask useful questions. In a typical lecture format, users are either forced to ask all of their questions in the brief final portion of a long training session or are so ready to do something else that they don’t even bother to ask the things they need answered. By sharing training content with users in advance, you then free up the time previously devoted to the lecture and can instead conduct more in-depth question-and-answer sessions.

Just like I told my audiences that I was only going to show them a portion of the software functionality during their initial trainings, I also told them that we’d be dedicating at least an hour specifically for their questions after they’d reviewed the videos. Once again, the purpose of this early call-out was to reassure the audience that our training priority was making sure they understood exactly what was being explained, and that we’d clarify any blind spots along the way. In addition, knowing they’d have as much time as they needed to ask questions in a separate meeting encouraged the audience to participate in those sessions, since they wouldn’t have to compete with their other teammates for the last few minutes of a lengthy training and would have the energy to remain engaged.

Finally, for every integration, we opened a chat channel dedicated specifically for questions that came up after the training and Q&A sessions were over. I can’t stress this enough, but our goal as a support organization was to ensure users always had a knowledgeable resource available to help them use our company’s products and systems, so while a similar channel might not be feasible for your company and its customers, your team should remain open to addressing ongoing questions for several weeks after your customers have been trained.

By changing your live lectures and presentations into live Q&A sessions, you’re changing the entire mood of the training program by making it far more participatory. Your audience will be far more engaged during conversations about how they use your company’s products, and your own team will be able to continually improve the training material by adding answers to questions that come up more frequently than others.

Write It All Down

Here’s where I shout out one of the most talented co-workers I’ve ever had the pleasure of learning from. In 2019, a former employer decided to evolve our support organization by adopting a Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) methodology, the gist of which involves creating detailed documentation for every customer request and accompanying solution. I’m painting with a broad brush here, but the goal of KCS is to not only provide support agents with a gigantic library of helpful knowledge articles they can share with customers, but simultaneously to increase customer confidence in the documentation itself, driving them to first seek answers in the knowledge base rather than immediately opening a new support request.

To manage the company’s KCS program, we hired Keelyn VanderWeide, and it was one of the best decisions that company ever made.

Keelyn was relentless in getting the company’s two dozen product support teams to adopt this new methodology, and it was no easy task. After all, who likes being told to completely change how they do their job? She pressed on, though, and soon our entire support organization was rapidly creating knowledge articles they could then share with other customers down the road. The whole process was a tremendous undertaking, but once everyone was up to speed we found that the switch to KCS reduced our time-to-close by allowing our support agents to respond to many customer requests with an already completed solution, rather than having to walk through the same steps over and over. I’ll admit that I was skeptical at first, but I’ve seen the light, all thanks to Keelyn.

Does your company’s support organization need to immediately drop everything and adopt a strict KCS system as well? Keelyn would probably say yes, but the point here is that the more information your team documents in a centralized knowledge base, the less they’ll need to repeat the same tasks with different customers (or with the same customer who might need the occasional reminder). I wouldn’t necessarily say that a complete adherence to all KCS principles is right for every support team, but by writing down as much as possible, your team ensures that everyone has access to the same information while also reducing the risk of a larger knowledge loss if someone should leave the company.

The bottom line: If you share any information with a customer even one time, you should probably make note of that information for the future. (Keelyn: If you’re reading this, I miss working with you and wish you all the best!)

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Want to know whether you need to change your training program? Measure how often your users have to be reminded how to perform the most basic functions in your company’s products. Perhaps the change will be as simple as emphasizing one or two more pieces of information in your training sessions, but in many cases, you might find that the format itself is leading to such collective amnesia.

If your company relies on long, boring lectures to teach customers and internal users, perhaps you could explore breaking them up into videos and conducting live Q&A sessions instead. If that’s not practical, your team could examine the existing content and cut out everything that’s not part of your audience’s 90 percent workflow, thus creating more time for questions at the end. Whatever you do, your team should always write everything down as they work with customers. These notes, articles or supplemental training content will only make resolving future requests easier, and at the end of the day, that’s what everyone wants.

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